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“Emily Owens, M.D.” recap (Ep. 1): “They think you’re some weird predatory lesbian.”

If there’s one thing that’s true about us in the Western world, it’s that actually having to visit a hospital in real life absolutely terrifies us. But man, do we love watching them on TV!

Welcome to Emily Owens, M.D., the newest drama about the medical world to hit our screens. While pilots are typically a shaky, sometimes awkward business, I have to say that this pilot felt solid to me, and I’m glad. There’s a reason we like hospital shows: the opportunities for drama, for miracles, for touching displays of humanity are unparallel. And you see, I really was quite the Grey’s Anatomy fan back in the day, but it jumped the shark for me a long time ago. I traumatize easily, and I was traumatized just one too many times. No offense to anyone who still watches! I just know the limits of my fragile disposition. It’s a bummer for me really, because I’ve missed all the really good lesbian stuff!

But what I really do miss were the early days of Grey’s, where you had the intense patient storylines splashed between real funny, quirky, relatable stuff with the cast, and while at not exactly the same level, that’s the enjoyable mixture it seems we have with Emily Owens, M.D. So don’t mess it up, writers! We meet our protagonist in the opening scene as she jeers a snarky high school student, always the way to start your day off right. The school which the student is sitting in front of, by the way, is apparently situated directly across the street from a huge hospital. So when you get alcohol poisoning from the flasks you sneak into prom, you can just walk across the street to get your stomach pumped! Good thinkin’, Denver!

The jeering of the high school kid allows Emily to relive her own incredibly uncool past, and as she bumbles into the Gleaming Palace Hospital, it seems she really is pretty dorky. Seriously though, have you guys visited hospitals that look like this? Is this hospital for the 1%? Or am I just really out of touch with hospitals? We then meet the rest of the core cast of characters in quick succession. There’s Will, King of Emily’s Heart, and then there’s Cassandra, That Evil Nemesis From High School Who Will Not Stop Following You, and most important of all, Tyra, New Best Buddy Who’s Also a Lesbo. And how I already love Tyra! Not only is she lovely and adorable, but she comes out with her love for the ladies almost immediately. Turns out she’s the daughter of the chief resident, but she assures Emily that this does not win her points, as her dad is not really her biggest fan. “He wanted a son, and got a lesbian instead.” A few scenes later, she then persuades Emily to find out whether a chick she’s been eyeing is on the gay spectrum or not. Emily stutters in response, but Tyra is all, you owe me! Because she found Emily’s pager for her, and losing your pager on the first day of being an intern is not a good move. Interns, right? Also, I don’t really understand how pagers work being that they’re pagers and I live in the modern world, but they always seem able to relay a crap ton of information on their tiny screens on these shows. It normally goes like this: Pager: BEEP BEEP. Person: “Oh my God! Mr. Roger’s left lung just collapsed and his toe fell off and he’s going septic and he also says he’s bored and wants me to pick up some pizza on the way.” Is there something magic about these tiny pager screens? Emily has already established that she’s awkward Sally unless there’s a medical emergency on hand, in which case she knows every single medical factoid ever and snaps into action like a super genius–oh, she also saved a girl’s life within her first ten minutes of being an intern, it’s cool. So she saunters up to Maybe Gay Girl for Tyra. As in Grey’s, we also get to hear a lot of Emily’s inner monologues, although they are markedly less raspy and more frazzled than Meredith Grey’s. She chants to herself to “be casual, be casual” as she starts her lesbian inquiry, which ends up being the funniest moment of the episode. They exchange a painfully horrible banter about what people do on the weekends around here which is only painful because it’s the boring kind of conversation that people actually engage in in workplaces all the time and they’re the worst. Emily manages to make her way to this gem though: “Speaking of bars! Do you go to straight ones or gay ones?” Best way to find out if someone is gay ever! Delivery is perfect!

Turns out girl isn’t gay, unfortunately, and actually turns out to be sort of a bitch. Sorry, Tyra. But you’re not the only one who’s having a bad love day. After some inspirational talk with the 12-year-old girl whose life she just saved, Emily decides to confront King of Her Heart Will and tell him that she liiiiiiikes him and wants to kissssss him. She went through med school with Will, so this crush goes back deep. It takes a good portion of the episode for her to get the balls to tell him, but when she does, she goes all in, giving some crazy metaphor about how she watched him crack open a chest and pull out a heart in school once and THAT HEART COULD HAVE BEEN HERS, and stuff! To which Will, who is Mr. Nice Guy, is all, “Oh! Uh, aw, well, shucks, this is unfortunate, isn’t it? Because I don’t see you that way, and, well, golly, that was nice what you said though, let’s be friends forever anyway all right good talk!” This is ROUGH, and she recovers as well as she can. No McDreamy for you, Emily! But there clearly is a McDreamy waiting, who is way McDreamier, and who finds Emily stuffing her face with chocolate in the stairwell afterwards. He takes her out into the hallway, says, “Look at all these people dying. Stop whining! But it’s okay to whine a little because you are a human being.” I generally like this, and I generally like him, but what I DON’T like is the fact that, after this little pep talk, he takes away the rest of her junk food. To the point of, after she’s already given him some, saying, “I know you have more! Naughty naughty!” Okay, so he doesn’t say “naughty naughty,” but I feel like I’ve seen this scene repeated in movies and TV (always to women) a gazillion times. LET THE WOMAN HAVE HER RING DINGS. She can eat her Ring Dings and still do her job! SHE PAID MONEY FOR THE RING DINGS! YOU DO NOT DESERVE THE RING DINGS! Do you even want the Ring Dings? Guess who does? Her! A few predictable storylines finish out the episode, such as discovering that Cassandra, Evil Nemesis From High School, actually has some painful stuff in her personal life and so we shouldn’t hate her THAT much (shocker!). The surgeon Emily reveres, Dr. Bandari, is a pretty tough hardass, but she DOES allow Emily some coveted time in the operating room and is not completely awful to her (shocker!). But there were a few twists that I didn’t see coming, mainly that the doctor who took Emily’s Ring Dings who had lectured her about a patient who was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, enters said patient’s room to give her the bad news, and it turns out that patient is his mom. This was the moment of the episode that tugged at my heartstrings the most and the most surprisingly. He really did have a worse day than you, Emily. But back to Tyra. In the locker room at the end of the long day, she thanks Emily for checking the gay waters for her and apologizes for how it turned out. She says, “Now the nurses think you’re some weird predatory lesbian.” Ha! She then follows up with the perfect, “Don’t worry. I told them you weren’t weird.” Double ha! Emily for her part only seems momentarily confused by this, then gets over it and and asks Tyra why she won’t come out to her dad, as we’ve learned during the episode that he’s one of the only people who doesn’t know. “You don’t seem like the closeted type,” she tells Tyra, and Tyra says that she really isn’t, that she’s more the lead-the-march type. There’s just something different about her dad. He’s perfect, and she feels like a kid around him. A lot of us have been there before, Tyra. Overall, I feel surprisingly hopeful about this show. While there were some writing moments that made me cringe–the chest cracking open thing–the back and forths between the 12-year-old and Emily were the best moments of the show, natural and funny and heartwarming. Emily is a likable character; she tows the line a little between adorably neurotic and annoyingly neurotic, but it’s nice that she’s not perfect. She’s cute but not overly gorgeous. I liked that the guy turned her down after her sweeping speech; it sucked for her but was realistic. The cast in general seems relatively diverse, and we really, really need all the lesbian characters of color we can get. And plus, I like Kelly McCreary‘s face.

Did you catch the pilot? What were your favorite parts of the episode? What are your feelings on the possibilities of the rest of the season?

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